NudgeCam

Guided video capture for enhanced communication

NudgeCam is a mobile application that uses guided capture to help users better document problems, discoveries, or other situations in the field.

In the past, media capture and access suffered primarily from a lack of storage and bandwidth. Today networked, multimedia devices are ubiquitous, and the core challenge has less to do with how to transmit more information than with how to communicate the right information.

NudgeCam is a mobile application that addresses this goal by using guided capture to better document problems, discoveries, or other situations in the field. To guide users to capture media more relevant to a particular project, third-party template creators can show users media that demonstrates relevant content and can tell users what content should be present in each captured media using tags and other meta-data such as location and camera orientation. To encourage higher quality media capture, NudgeCam provides real time feedback based on standard media capture heuristics, including face positioning, pan speed, audio quality, and many others.

NudgeCam integrates heuristics for capturing people. When a face is detected that is too small or too centered, if the camera is not in the same plane as the subject visual cues are overlayed on the view to prompt the user to correct the detected problem. Text reminders also appear along the bottom of the frame, in this case prompting the photographer to direct that the subject not look directly into the camera.

Template creators can attach orientation information to demonstrations to indicate that a particular capture always should be oriented in the same direction. The recording view indicates to the end user that they need to both pan right and tilt up to match the demonstration’s orientation.

Template creators can attach location information to demonstrations to indicate that a particular capture always has to occur at a particular place (e.g., for tour guides). When demonstrations are geotagged, end users can view demonstrations both in a list view and a map view.

Abstract

NudgeCam is a mobile application that can help users capture more relevant, higher quality media. To guide users to capture media more relevant to a particular project, third-party template creators can show users media that demonstrates relevant content and can tell users what content should be present in each captured media using tags and other meta-data such as location and camera orientation.
To encourage higher quality media capture, NudgeCam provides real time feedback based on standard media capture
heuristics, including face positioning, pan speed, audio quality, and many others. We describe an implementation of
NudgeCam on the Android platform as well as field deployments of the application.